Village the Game: Play it. Love it. Live it.

Here's the letter I just sent to the Gates Foundation asking for $4 million to fund VillagetheGame development. Let me know if you have ideas on improving this letter ...

Dear Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,

First off, congratulations on partnering with Warren Buffet to improve the lives of billions of people! I saw part of a Charlie Rose interview with Warren Buffett and how he chose the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation because your enthusiasm for philanthropic work really stood out. That is quite a testimony to your passion for improving people's lives!

My first experience with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was as a Computer Science major at Johns Hopkins University in 1998. Vivek Baluja, another Computer Science major, convinced the Gates Foundation to donate $60,000 and 13+ state-of-the-art NT machines to the Greenmount Recreation Center. The second half of my freshman year I volunteered as a teacher at the Greenmount Computer Center of Baltimore, MD funded by this foundation.

Nine years later am I writing you to request support for a whole new effort that addresses multiple goals of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It will:

1. Educate charitable donors on how to more effectively improve the health, education, and livelihoods of people in developing nations.

2. Provide a new and entertaining tool to educate America's high school students on how to be socially responsible entrepreneurs.

3. Offer a simulation platform to experiment with solutions of public health issues in developing nations.

I call it Village. http://www.villagethegame.com. Fully developed, Village is a multiplayer, online, real-time strategy game for the PC that immerses the player in the role of an entrepreneur building companies to bring prosperity to the villages of the third world.

Quantity and Type of Support
Based on current salary surveys and a 3 year initial development cycle VillagetheGame needs $4 million for development. Once the game is built and operational Village will be self sustaining from sales of the game, sales of online play subscriptions, and sales of advertising spots within the game.
In addition to the $4 million startup funding, the Gates Foundation could also provide contacts within the Xbox community to prepare Village for porting to the Xbox platform.

Needs Statement
Charitable donors, high school students, and public health professionals all have one common need: experimenting with solutions. Village lets them do that. The charitable sector needs to see what impact their donations will have on developing nations even before they make those donations. Experimenting with solutions gives donors confidence in their choices. Many high school students need a higher purpose to motivate them to graduate. When a high school student sees through Village how they could help transform the lives of thousands of less-fortunate people while learning how to be a socially responsible entrepreneur they will gain that higher purpose. And finally, public health professionals will have a new tool to show how the products or services they are promoting will impact the lives of the villagers they serve.

Gauging Progress and Results
For Village progress and results are multidimensional. Measuring that impact happens mostly through surveying the players of Village when they sign up for their online account and monitor their progress in improving their virtual villages. Yet the greatest metric of all is how many real villages grow healthier and more prosperous as Village gamers choose to get involved.

Organizational Information
Villagethegame.com has not yet incorporated or filed for 501(c)3 status. That decision depends on who fully funds the production first: foundations or venture capitalists. If a foundation realizes the impact VillagetheGame.com has on their mission, then it will go nonprofit. Otherwise Village will seek out funding from appropriate venture capitalists and move forward as a for profit venture. Village has the same double bottom line as the social enterprises that it promotes, hence both sources of funding are relevant.

Below is my contact info and a copy of the one page game proposal. Thank you for reading this letter. Together, I'm looking forward to leveraging Gates Foundation's altruism to inspire and inform the altruism of millions of more people.

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